26/11/2014

Fashion in Motion: Sibling

The brief moment of “fashion” seen in its most true and authentic sense – meaning, that concentrated blow of novelty and creativity that will come to fuel trends and many other fashion moments – is precisely the most ephemeral of all “fashion moments”: the fashion show. The live fashion series Fashion in Motion at the V&A Museum in London introduces the pleasure of high fashion runway to a larger audience. It originally started in 1999 with a showcase of Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer collection, followed by a long stream of designers – from Yohji Yamamoto to Erdem Moralioglu, from Roksanda Ilincic to Christian Lacroix – the last of which was last friday’s showcase of London-based, knitwear-obsessed brand Sibling.

Sibling was founded in 2008 by Joe Bates, Sidney Bryan and Cozette McCreery. As individual designers they had previously worked with fashion houses such as Alexander McQueen and Lanvin. The foundation of Sibling was, therefore, set for the trio’s fashionable progression. The brand had its first fashion showcase in 2009, sponsored by Newgen Men. Finding inspiration from a vast range of sources, everything in Sibling’s surroundings, from their everyday life in London to youth tribes and photography, ignites a vision and guides their creation. It is easy to understand how Sibling’s signature style, which mixes color and glamourous knitwear with eccentric playfulness, might result from such a varied world of references. The label’s unexpected designs continually propose a new spin on knitwear, presenting it in many different forms and shapes, from basic menswear pieces to knitted denim jackets and decorated leopard twinsets.

During the retrospective runway show staged at the V&A, one could spot different showstoppers from the brand’s past collections as Sibling brought back some of their favorite looks from past seasons. In the iconic Raphael Gallery of Victoria and Albert museum buff male models strutted energetically down the runway smiling, laughing and even high-fiving to the beats of pop music. The show perfectly captured the essence of the label, creating a lively and colorful show that mimics the brand’s true colors as an iconic ‘playful rebel’.

Victoria Edman – Images courtesy of the V&A 
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25/11/2014

Vests for Late Autumn

The term vest derives from the Latin word “vestis”, which, originally, referred to a completely different type of clothing from a sleeveless coat, wool V neck sweater or even the traditional garment men wear under their suits, designated today with the term. And yet, the vest, has a long standing tradition as a typical menswear cloth, first popularized by King Charles II of England. Today, the vest remains one of the most popular items on the autumn runways, designed as much for women as for men.

On Milan’s catwalks we saw it in various versions: the ones by Missoni were fluffy and long, short and padded, rendered in a warm and autumnal palette for an interesting twist. Definitely less romantic and more urban, were the ones designed by Reed Krakoff. From small to bigger silhouettes, the approach remains the same: easy yet refined. Etro, instead, has decided to play with shearling for a short, but completely decorated result. For a second version, Etro chose wool, rendered in a retro mountain pattern and styled with cool long skirts. Prada took a similar path, with an extra large version of a mannish vest, proposed in different variations for Miu Miu Resort 2015 and even for Prada SS 2015.

Francesca Crippa 
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24/11/2014

Style Suggestions: Singing in the Rain

The long season of rain and cold is ahead of us, yet you don’t have to fear the gloomy weather if you learn to pick the right accessories. An elegant trench coat and a pair of cool rain boots should be matched with a classy hat and a colorful umbrella for a perfect rainy-day rhapsody.

Trench coat: Maison Martin Margiela, Hat: Super Duper, Bag: Givenchy, Boots: Miu Miu, Umbrella: Borsalino

Styling by Vanessa Cocchiaro 

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21/11/2014

Ann-Sofie Back: Everything Must Go

Ann-Sofie Back, internationally recognised for her unconventional pieces, is the first Swedish fashion designer to be awarded the Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Prize, that includes a hefty monetary prize and, more importantly, an exhibition at the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg. Ann-Sofie Back grew up in a suburb of Stockholm, which – together with her parents’ bad taste in fashion – effected her unique take on craft. It made her see fashion from a perspective of someone who feels ashamed or insecure, therefore uses clothes to become someone else in order to fit or feel a part of a group. This feeling has influenced much of her work, expressed and interpreted in various collections through themes such as plastic surgery and fear.

Back studied fashion at the Beckman’s College of Design before taking an MA in Fashion Design at London’s Central Saint Martins in 1998. After graduating, she worked as a designer for Acne (she won the Elle Designer of the Year prize during this period) and held styling jobs for fashion magazines like Self Service and Purple Magazinee. Three years after graduation, she founded her eponymous label (which is currently on hold), followed by a secondary label, named Back, created in 2005. Besides designing for her own brand, Ann-Sofie Back is also the head of design at Cheap Monday. During her almost 15-year-long, successful career, Ann-Sofie Back has never been afraid to stand out and lead her own way. Her design aesthetic is far from the clean style Swedish designers often are related to; Back’s approach has been described as uncommercial and conceptual. Her whole image is built on unconventional ideas which question both the fashion world and the rest of society. She designs clothes for women who dress for themselves or to appeal to other women, rather than men. In fact, unsurprisingly, among her fans she can count bold women like Lady Gaga, Kate Moss, Rihanna and HRH Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden.

Back’s exhibition at the Röhsska Museum is created with the same conceptual base as her collections.The theme is “one pound shops” with sale-signs and specially-produced products such as T-shirts, toilet paper and lighters put on display in connection to her previous collections, together with key pieces from past lines. The exhibition “Back. Everything Must Go” intends to create Back’s dream shop, the one she will never probably never be able to have, resulting in a witty combination of unconventional design and the most mundane version of mass consumption.

Hanna Cronsjö 
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20/11/2014

Modern Wunderkammer: Noritaka Tatehana at SHOWStudio

What is a wunderkammer? Historically, it is the place of accumulation: a space for people to keep interesting, loved, strange objects with no clear use or meaning. Fashion world’s fascination with the theme of wunderkammer has always been tangible, as a way to keep trace of objects as well as references, instants, obsessions. SHOWstudio’s SHOWcabinet, the gallery located in Belgravia’s iconic Pantechnicon Building on Motcomb Street, has what it takes to be a modern wunderkammer: a physical place where art and fashion meet on a ever changing basis,where all its shifts are documented – and implemented with related contents – on its online platform.

The first artist to show here was Daphne Guinnes, and this month the place hosts the works of the designer she is most tied to, Noritaka Tatehana. Defining him is not easy, but maybe the best title we could use is ‘master of heels’ – even if ‘heels’ in the western idea are, for him, a completely transfigured element. His practice, standing between craftsmanship and art, allows him to create pieces inspired by Japanese tradition, inflating his works with modernity, thanks to the use of avant-garde techniques derived precisely form the mastery of traditional crafts.

For Tatehana, appearance is everything: drawing inspiration from Japanese courtesans – the Oiran – every piece is a complex ensemble of precious materials, unexpected forms and incredible details. Looking at his works is a new way to experience Japanese art and to get a glimpse into traditions and culture, without necessarily understanding them: enjoying his works is, first of all, agreeing to pure aesthetic contemplation. Together with Tatehana’s works, SHOWCabinet showcases the photorealist portraits of artist Taisuke Mohri, whose poetic merges motifs both from the East and West; illusion, mirrors, cracked surfaces which blur the line between reality and imagination.

Even the very moment of creation is documented in this modern wunderkammer. Prior to the exhibition, Tatehana created a pair of shoes right in front of the camera. As Nick Knight stated: ‘We actually want to show the process of creating art, so we show people how the artist works and we allow people into that moment.’ Thanks to technology and video, and to collaboration with hybrid personalities like Tatehana, whose work cannot be assimilated to just one discipline, SHOWstudio has given new life to the Wunderkammer, proposing a new democratisation of not only art, but of the creative process itself.

Marta Franceschini 
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19/11/2014

Pierre Cardin: The Future is Now

Last week one of the great creators of 1960s fashion spirit – Pierre Cardin – opened the doors of his Past-Present-Future museum in the posh Marais neighborhood of Paris, showing the last 50 years of his avant-garde career, known for an out-of-the-ordinary futuristic touch, geometric shapes and outer-space millinery.

Pierre Cardin moved to Paris in 1945, where he started working at the Paquin fashion house founded by famous designer Jeanne Paquin. He would move to the fashion house of Elsa Schiaparelli within months. The subsequent year Cardin began to work for Christian Dior’s newly opened maison. As soon as 1950 Pierre Cardin established his own house and in 1953 he presented his first womenswear collection. The following year he introduced the “bubble dress”, which sparked an instant success. Looking for inspiration outside of Paris’ narrow fashion scene, Cardin started to draw from Eastern influences, becoming the first couturier to launch his products on the Japanese high fashion market in 1959. Since then, Pierre Cardin fashion house has become an empire, producing products as disparate as house furniture and bottle water.

The exhibition of the Past-Present-Future museum collects around 200 pieces tracing Cardin’s career through haute-couture designs, accessories and jewelry. The visual representation is stripped-down, yet at the same time overwhelming: decorated with nothing more than a date-label the contextual placement within fashion history or the designer’s own creative past is meant to be constructed by the viewer. A couple images of the designer himself adorn the walls, but Cardin hopes his designs will speak for themselves. The outfits include coats with square pleats, skirts threaded with hoops and even a black lace dress perfectly fitting for the red carpet of today. Looking at this vast collection on cannot but wonder how does Pierre Cardin’s prophetic mind really work.

Victoria Edman 
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18/11/2014

Winter in White

Wearing white clothing after Labor Day, the first Monday of September, has been a controversial subject for many years. Why? Because, back in the day, a part of fashion world used to have rules it had to deal with, a kind of a bon-ton scheme, where white was considered only related to summer and leisure time. And, for that reason only, one should have stopped wearing it in Autumn. Fortunately things have changed, therefore nowadays, along with matching blue and black or red and pink, white during fall and winter season has been legitimized, too. Last fashion shows have proven it for good: many designers have chosen the candid nuance for their warm and fuzzy winter catwalks.

We saw a comfy yet sophisticated approach at Barbara Bui’s show, where embroidery capes, along with turtleneck sweaters and sartorial trousers made the collection perfect for winter season. Ennio Capasa at Costume National offered a different point of view, with black shoes interrupting the white harmony and a fur vest adding an unexpected twist to the brand’s minimal look composed of a slouchy pair of pants and a blouse. Gareth Pugh, on the other hand, proposes a typically exaggerated show, with fairies from other planets hovering on the runway, all wrapped up in odd covers and dresses – some more bi-dimensional others extremely soft.

Whatever you’d rather chose as your favourite winter piece, white is for sure a trend you should not forget, both in the city and on the slopes.

Francesca Crippa 
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17/11/2014

Style Suggestions: Modernist

Clean cuts, sleek lines, pure colours and sophisticated detailing for a conceptual modern look. Refine your Winter wardrobe with these modernist interpretations of classic everyday pieces.

Jacket: Christophe Lemaire, Shirt: Umit Benan, Bag: Marni, Shoes: Givenchy, Baseball Cap: Rick Owens,

Styling by Vanessa Cocchiaro 

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14/11/2014

The Talented: Sadie Williams

Ever since Sadie Williams sent eight eye-catching gowns down the runway of her Central Saint Martins MA graduating show in 2013, her unique design aesthetic was launched to the foreground of innovative fashion sphere. Now she is lighting up our dark Winter wardrobes with her new collaboration with the Swedish brand & Other Stories, which follows her characteristic design. The collection includes both scuba dresses and silk shirts, fusing her luxurious and unmistakably personal prints, bold colours and metallic influences with sporty yet classic silhouettes. The collection is an exercise in balancing commercial needs with innovative design by offering both Williams’ striking design as well as more natural and toned-town pieces suitable for a wider distribution.

Being creative lays within Sadie Williams’s DNA: her brother Joe Williams is a talented animator and filmmaker and her aunt, Venetia Scott, is a fashion editor and photographer. After following a traditional design education in one of the most influential fashion schools, only a year after her graduation Williams has already been absorbed within the mainstream fashion world. The question that we must ask is will her work, praised for an unconventional, multicultural approach – drawing from different culture, styles, and historical periods – be flattened by the needs of commercial success, or is she mature enough to keep her voice independent.

AUTHOR 
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13/11/2014


1914 Now: Four Perspectives On Fashion Curating

The 14th edition of Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Rem Koolhas, focuses on “architecture, and not architects”. It aims at pointing out the process that any country has undertaken to erase the characters of national architecture and to conform to a universal language between 1914 and 2014. Koolhas’ exhibition serves as a way to retrace the history of modern times while underlining the features each country has kept and protected. The project stresses the narrative and the power of architecture to tell its own story by reflecting upon its forms, features, its fundamentals. History of fashion and history of architecture have much in common: they talk about objects that have become material memories, things that have a function in people’s life, and thus become more than mere ‘things’. Telling their own story, these object testify the shifts in the use, bear the signs of the past and bring these ‘wounds’ as fundamental elements in reconsidering history.

The exhibition “1914 Now. Four Perspectives on Fashion Curation”, inaugurated at Spazio Punch in Venice on November 6th, reflects on history from the perspective of a curator. Alison Moloney form London College of Fashion has gathered four curators, different both in terms of their interests and research fields, asking them to think about dress in relation to the decisive year, 1914. Taking the curatorial practice out of its natural context, the curators have collaborated with filmmakers to explore their practice within the frame of the video. Amy de la Haye and Katerina Athanasopoulou started from a tea gown to examine the dawn of modernity. Judith Clark and James Norton used ‘il manifesto tecnico futurista’ by Giacomo Balla to read the ‘set’ in which life took place; Kaat Debo and Marie Schuller the tensions between ornament and modernity and how the need of the new affects progress; Walter Van Beirendonck collaborated with Bart Hess to reinterpret the typical war helmet from a new, nearly ironical perspective.

Video is a ‘creative’ instrument, in the sense that it allows to create a new output holding together elements and aesthetics that often come from the past. These four videos, though different in style and direction, are all examples of storytelling; and of different ways one can approach curating, seen as a ‘creative’ action. Moloney’s curatorial operation in bringing together all these different personalities and making them collaborate, with their differences in poetics and practices, shows the need to turn fashion history into an instrument not only for re-reading modernity, but to actually move toward the future really understanding its reasons rooted in the past.

Marta Franceschini 
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